An American In Paris (February 1967 | Volume: 18, Issue: 2)

An American In Paris

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Authors: Stephen Hess

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February 1967 | Volume 18, Issue 2

“On the 10th day of September, 1877, I left Paris for home, going to Havre and then taking the steamer to pass over to Southampton where I was to take the German steamer for New York. After a reasonably good passage to New York we reached what was thereafter to be our home at Chicago, on the 23rd of September, 1877. It was on the 17th day of March, 1869, that … Mr. Hamilton Fish as Secretary of State … [had] signed my commission as Minister to France … this made my term of service as Minister eight years and a half, a longer time than that of any of my predecessors.”

There is an unmistakable note of satisfaction, of accomplishment and completion, in these last lines of Elihu Washburne’s Recollections of a Minister to France, and well there should be. When he had been appointed to the post by President Grant, he had served for sixteen years in the House of Representatives, some of that time as chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee; but his fitness for a diplomatic career was not apparent, and his appointment to Paris raised few cheers. “He goes as Minister to France, a post for which he may have some qualifications,” The Nation commented on March 18, 1869, “but what they are it would be difficult to say.” And the often-malicious Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles, wrote: “He may represent correctly the man who appoints him, but is no credit to the country.”

Yet during his tour of duty in Paris Washburne was to prove very much a credit to his country, the personification of the nineteenth-century American ideal: the man of uncommon common sense who, when challenged beyond his expectation, responds beyond ordinary limits.

Washburne came from an unusual family. He and his brothers—who spelled their surname without the final “e”—were collectively to serve fifty years in Congress, representing four different states: Maine, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. During one five-year period, starting in 1855, three of them were in the House of Representatives together. Indeed it seemed, as the eccentric Populist congressman Ignatius Donnelly said, that in the Washburn family “every young male … is born into the world with ‘M.C.’ franked across his broadest part.”

But “Member of Congress” must have seemed a most unlikely expectation for the sons of Israel Washburn, Sr., a bankrupt Maine shopkeeper. In recounting his early years, Elihu wrote, “Our family was very, very poor.” He was not the type to exaggerate; only one “very” would not have been sufficient. After the sheriff had attached their country store in 1829, thirteen-year-old Elihu spent five months as a farmhand working off a twenty-five-dollar debt that his father owed one “Uncle Lovewell.” By the time he was fourteen Elihu could write, “I was not only not an expense to them [his parents], but my various little earnings went to help support the family.” He worked primarily as an apprentice printer,